Judge prods FBI over plans for Internet spying

At CNET, Declan McCullagh reports on a federal judge's rejection of the FBI's attempts to withhold information about its efforts to make backdoors for government surveillance mandatory for internet firms.

CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg ruled on Tuesday that the government did not adequately respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Seeborg, in San Francisco, ordered (PDF) a "further review of the materials previously withheld" in the lawsuit, which seeks details about what the FBI has dubbed "Going Dark" -- the bureau's ongoing effort to force companies including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google to alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

This is the scariest thing this country is currently dealing with, IMO. This cements the total entrenchment of the spy community into the average American’s gateway to the internet. This is so much more than just demanding access to networks under a gag order, e.g., Bush-era’s NSA tapping of AT&T’s international pipelines. Apparently, Qwest was the only company that denied total access to their network (maybe any access, IDK, but who will?). No one knew about this until an engineer decided to be a whistle-blower. I thank him almost every day for his utterly patriotic act. The reason I think this time it’s worse entails multiple reasons: We’re dealing with the most exhausting election year on record, we’re nearing the holiday season so peoples’ attention is fixed on that notion (**and 2012**, if you believe the 2012 FUD). The other main reason this is so offensive to the American public is we can’t really oppose this like we opposed SOPA. This isn’t a Congressionally-authorized act. The current administration would have the final say and the Obama administration has been as bad or worse than the GW Bush administrations were concerning ‘transparency’. Don’t even get me going about his record on letting states regulate their own MMJ programmes!